I don't see ads, thanks to ad blocking tech in browsers and smartphones. Any time that happens to fail and I get to endure an ad, I am amazed that regular people without ad blocking tech can endure this onslaught.

The time to negotiate a "middle ground" is long past. Let's not even entertain that idea.

An acceptable middle ground could have been designated areas for ads, which you have to seek out to see them. Think of the Yellow Pages.

Ad companies need to be reined in. They cannot control themselves. They are lobbying against all limits and controls. The only solution is to eradicate ads entirely and to make sure that anyone who gets that idea will never get it again.

If someone wants to install an advert app on their fridge (I assume in exchange for money) then fair enough.

If I buy a tv I shouldn't just have to accept that, now or in the future, the manufacturer will sell advertising on it.

These devices used to be ours with some level of control, and now they are all remotely managed to present awful content at all hours

This ad did the rounds last week and people were talking in the comments about this scenario.

Sure it could've happened, but odds are this is just made up.

The legal advice subreddits are, unfortunately, often the target of some creative writing exercises. I feel like this is probably one, but acknowledge we'll never know for sure.

Either way it's a terrible ad and fridges shouldn't have ads.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1ow6cpu/appa...

But when they add an LED display and Internet connection, suddenly they forget about cooling your food and impulsively add a bunch of adversarial functionality, meaning functions that monetize the consumer rather than keeping the food cool.

It’s like the Internet advertising ecosystem is a virus intent on infecting anything and anyone with an Internet connection, making them do bizarre customer-hostile things they never would have done otherwise.

Recommendation threads on Reddit usually begin with "anything but Samsung". They seem designed to be made cheap and hit the lowest price point with consumers that don't want to spend a lot more on something they don't really care about, so I'm not surprised to learn that ads are a part of their strategy.

But also, why do fridges need to connect to the internet?

"Was it out in front of Discount Shoe Outlet?"

"Yeah..."

"They have a college kid wear that to attract customers."

This won’t help with devices that require 24x7 internet access, but it’s great for things you want to access the local network but don’t trust not to send info to a third party. (TVs, music amps with built in streaming, home surveillance systems [1], etc.)

Also handy for briefly turning on Internet access for software updates or one time activation.

[1] while making a surveillance system available online safely and with software you control isn’t hard, it’s not trivial. Turning Internet access off for your cameras without a plan will mean you can’t monitor your home or get alerts when away from your local network.

As an aside, having scroll that thread, Reddit is a shambles. There's more deleted comments and related justification comment than actual comments. Make for a jarring experience.

“EDIT 2: Hello, I am the original poster of the carol AD image from a month ago. I am a male from America and my name is not Carol. The story about a Schizophrenic woman named carol was most likely fabricated from the 3rd top comment on this post. Thanks!”

Fake Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1pc7999/my_s...

Yesterday a good friend reached out to me on a new phone number to wish me happy holidays, she shortly afterwards asked me to donate to a fund to help her sick cat.

Even though this person had a similar typing style, the unrecognized phone number made me feel paranoid that it may be an LLM attempting to get money from me in an automated scam, so I made the choice to call my friend to get more evidence via voice.

It turned out to be my friend(or an even more elaborate ruse using voice capture and mass data-mining tech, but that seemed extremely unlikely, at least for another couple years).

My brother had full on shizpphrenia, and would often call family members asking them to provide evidence that they are who they say they are and not government robots. It was an obvious delusion when he was alive, but now that we're in a world where that sort of evidence-gathering is no longer extreme, paranoia is the new normal.

Our usual safeguards of identity are breaking down, and you can bet that large corporations with an eye on the coin are going to swoop in to establish new, more secure methods of identification.

This story, while fun to discuss, should be flagged, and not on the FP of HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46171868

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/s/FzGerVEUM8

The problem is today you can't really tell anymore whether this "Carol" the ad was addressing is the advertiser knowing that it's your name or just a random "clever" reference to a character in the TV show, I mean even after getting the resolution that it's the latter, nobody can be sure if this excludes the former, like the algorithm decided to send Carol an ad about a show with a Carol in it. It's not good to have to make up your mind about it even when you are not suffering from schizophrenia.

It's annoying, it's intrusive, it wastes your time and ruins your day. And it makes you hate your new tech, makes you hate tech in general, because it's a big "fuck you we can do what we want with you now" towards the customers. No wonder Luddites are making a come back, that's just self-defense.

Too bad for the backslash, it’s a great show.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rzmFNVBIfCQ

So a simple app that lets you control the color and brightness of the screen.

You only find this with adds on the play store and it shares your data with 3. parties as well as permanently showing an add banner.

This isn't progress, it's broken.

What good could you expect from an appliance that's permanently communicating with its non-giving a f*ck about users, profit driven, immoral and unethical mothership ? Would you really expect your life to be better after buying such a product ?

Imagine if advertisers were directly responsible for cleaning up after themselves. For newspapers, they'd need to recycle the equivelent amount of paper their ads take up in all papers distributed. For ads on digital devices, an amount of processing power equivalent to the amount used to display them all would be user for a good cause (say folding). Or even just the same amount of electrical power used could be donated to a good cause. And for incidents like this, the company would be directly liable and bound to clean up.

Or we could just ban them and also get rid of the long list of other downsides with ads.

If you want to put an end to this you’ll either need to boycott products, make your own, or get something serious passed to abolish a good chunk of ads. This industry is loaded with money and they reinforce their own (see: ads on fridges) so good luck. It’s a tough battle.

Oh, and there are no roadway ads in Vermont.

Today that’s gone - you can for a fee never see an advert again. And that fee is easier to pay if you are rich, and harder if poor. And so more and more “traditional” advertising will become aggressive and aimed at both lower income audience and more scammy products (because you are selling to the poorest you cannot beat costs eventually). And advertising will stop being about “brand” (which are naturally less aggressive and focused on closing) and more about the last click to sale.

We are already seeing this world take shape, as “influencers” become the way to reach those who have paid to stop all other advertising, and why travel influencers are head of that pack.

Ultimately this is about design of our public spaces. We rightly celebrate architects, civil engineers and their sponsors who create enjoyable and beneficial built areas - we have still to get a hold of the digital public spaces. While Times Square has a quality of its own, living there permanently would have mental health issues for most of us.

And in the end, positive public spaces are associated with the words paternalism, socialism, public good and none with Toll, extraction, rentierism.

The arguments against ads are arguments for paternalism of government control for a better life for us all.

The main character is called "Carol". As also, it seems is the person who saw it here.

Back in the day we asked webmasters to run their web sites through Bobby for accessibility checks.

I am curious if any LLM work like this is being done. If it were really a smart fridge, it would moderate its users content appropriately. Eg I don’t want haram ads, don’t freak me out, I’m color blind.

I have Philips Hue lights, it started out great, now every time I open that app it slaps an ad in my face. I paid hundreds of euros for that system. Never again.

It’s also a gimmick, and gimmicks on things like appliances and cars are red flags for poor quality. Appliances in particular are best when simple and designed for their function. “Feature” means “thing that will break.”

If it was up to a jury, the creepy ads might not get much sympathy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...

I really wish regulators stopped being corrupt, naive or both and outright made it illegal.

There is no upside for tracking of any kind for consumers.

Here's the /r/assholedesign post: https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1ow6cpu/appa...

It shows a webpage with an ad being displayed in the browser app.

How do we know?

Full-screen ads don't show on the cover screen (home screen).

Here's the investigation:

https://9to5google.com/samsung-smart-fridge-ads-how-to-turn-...

>Any ad shown would be limited to the cover screen widget, which displays news, weather, and calendar events.

>The ad shown in the Reddit photo is of the fridge’s Samsung Internet app. Through that, an ad seems to have shown up organically through a third-party website.

Here's the docs that talk about ads on the cover screen:

https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS10007562/

It's easy for ragebait to short-circuit your critical thinking skills.

Don't let Redditards like /u/Shellnanigans get their fix.